According to Jeff Kell: > > On Sat, 25 Mar 1995 14:23:58 -0600 Richard Gambrell said: > >BTW Any of you 4-gl providers interested in making the hp3k web server > >have friendly access to Image? This sounds to me like a market > >opportunity... > > Well, that's intercepting things at too low of a level. What you really > need is a cgi-bin "shell" for applications. Recall that a Web transaction > sends a chunk of data (request) and returns output to the client. If you > can "encapsulate" an arbitrary program so that the "request" is fed to its > $stdin, and it's $stdlist is returned to the client, you've got a start. > Then you can insulate the application from the network programming. The > same approach could be used to hook in a gopher transaction (as Eric is > doing at Notre Dame). > > I'm a little apprehensive about the startup/load/DBOPEN/etc overhead > with this though, but I don't see any obvious way to clean it up given > that the Web server will create a new instance of the cgi-bin process > for each transaction. Maybe IPC files(?)... > > [\] Jeff Kell, [log in to unmask] > A pair of message files could be setup, so that the database report provider-process could just suspend waiting for the next request. I don't know a lot about how the Web servers talk to other processes, as yet, but I do know that I would really like to be able to feed quiz or quick output as a result of a URL (especially if I have the username, etc.) It seemed to me that someone out there might find a good market for a tool (or set of tools) to do this. A tool that would format database information into html based on search data input from a secure form with a username - this would be really useful, but if it built on top of a known report writer(s) like quiz then it would be more than useful. -- -- - - - Speaking for myself and not necessarily anybody else - - - - - - Richard Gambrell | Internet: [log in to unmask] Mgr. Tech. Services | POT: 504-483-7454 FAX: 504-482-1561 Xavier University of LA | Smail: 7325 Palmetto, New Orleans, LA 70125